Pleasing Chains in the Soft Folds of Love
by Wendy Brune
Summary: O! Virgin, worthy no such chains to prove,but pleasing chains in the soft folds of love; Andromeda's life as written for the 100 drabble challenge at the HPFC forum.
1. Prolouge

**A/N: **Written for the 100 drabble challenge on the HPFC forum! There should be 101 chapters by the time I'm finished, each based based on a different prompt. This prologue is the exception. I'm not having this story beta'd, so please let me know if you notice anything. Reviews are always appreciated.

Quotes throughout come from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.

* * *

**Prologue**

_O! Virgin, worthy no such chains to prove, _  
_But pleasing chains in the soft folds of love;_

**-----**

How so very often it is that children become cursed with the woes of the generation before them. It is a tedious exercise of circularity, and not even a will of Herculean proportions can break it. Blame by association; everyone is guilty by name and nature.

A blushing beauty chained to a rock, bare for all to see; oh, how the sea tumbles and plumbles around her. Cassiopeia's confidence becomes her own undoing! - does the wrath of a higher deity no longer spare the innocent?

Hark, watch for the flight of a hero to swoop in with the power of glimmering stone. Oh, how swiftly he emancipates the fair maiden from an atonement that belongs naught to her.

_(one set of restricting chains exchanged for another)_


	2. Frog

**I. Frog**

Andromeda's furious, but Mummy doesn't care; _hold still_, as Andromeda wiggles about. She dislikes the frilly pink dress Mummy's forced her to wear, and she doesn't want the ribbon that's being tied in her hair. She'd rather run about outside or take a tumble in the mud with froggy friends.

_Hush daughter_, and she eventually does, but not without a fair share of tears. She lets herself be layered in sugary sweet lace and perfumed frills until she resembles something closer to an over-sized birthday cake than a five-year-old girl. She's everything Mummy wants her to be: the picture of pretty princess perfection.

_-so lovely, so adorable, so perfectly matched-_

She later finds that the rips and tears and mud and blood shatter the illusion wonderfully.


	3. Apple Sauce

**II. Apple Sauce  
**

She's not at all partial to apple sauce. _(neither chewy nor chunky_). The smell is atrocious - all preservatives, not enough apple - and the taste leaves something to be desired. But that's what babies and little children eat, isn't it? _(she's too old for this). _She'll have to buy more apple sauce, won't she? (_merlin how many galleons are left in the vault). _Soon she'll be drowning in a world of apple sauce, floating among the all too liquidy concoction and bumping into the chemically (de)enhanced apple bits. The very thought makes her stomach wiggle with a disgust she just can't shake.

Nymphadora, her only daughter, is dead, and all she can think about is _apple sauce._

* * *

**A/N: **Sorry for beating the prompt upside your head!


	4. Evil

**III. Evil**

Broken plates and broken hearts, all for her to clean up after the fight that evening; it's over something so trivial (what to name the baby? what midwife to use?) that she can't even recall the source anymore. The spats are growing oftener and oftener - so often that she sometimes wickedly dreams of ways to hurt (_stupid fat oafish_) Ted.

In her softer moments, her wishful attacks are comprised only of slicing words. She'd like nothing more than to call him hurtful names. It takes every measure of her will power not to tell him how impure, imperfect, and impossible he is; he's a _mudblood_, and she wants to blame him for making her one by association.

Less often are the moments that she actually wants to physically hurt him, but they come too, like thirsty sheep flocking to water. Her inner demons paint glorious pictures of a withering Ted, fresh from a good Crucio curse. She knows she should be repulsed, shocked, alarmed; instead comes respite, satisfaction, appeal.

(_you can take the girl out of the evil family, but you can't take the evil family out of the girl.)_


	5. Hufflepuff

**IV. Hufflepuff**

_Yellow like ducklings and dandelions; Black like her beautiful last name._**  
**

It's on a dewy summer afternoon that she learns all about Hogwarts, or Hoggywars, as she pronounces it. Some distant cousin (_who isn't a distant cousin to the black family?) _tells her about the four houses - green and silver, blue and bronze, yellow and black, red and gold. Not even fully comprehending it all, she instantly chooses her future house. Perhaps it's foolish to choose one's company based solely on childhood choice colors, but at age three, it's sound logic to her. She prances around the manor that day, proudly telling anyone who will listen what colors she'll be wearing at Hoggywars.

Daddy doesn't find it amusing, and she has the the bruises to prove it. _  
_

_Yellow like hornets and hangnails; Black like her horrific last name._**  
**


End file.
